Gloucester celebrate a try as they boosted their hopes of progressing from Pool Two.
Photograph: Alex Davidson/Getty Images

They have cracked this Premiership malarkey, but still Europe confounds Exeter. With this defeat, the Chiefs are all but out. It will feel just as painful to have been thus dismissed, within the walls of their own fortress, by Gloucester, familiar old Gloucester, against whom they know well the taste of victory.

“That’s the big question,” conceded Rob Baxter, Exeter’s director of rugby. “Whether we just aren’t getting our heads around the Champions Cup thing quite yet, whether we’ve convinced ourselves that things have to be so different, that it’s making us quite inefficient. That’s our beauty as a side. We win things because we are a bit of a machine. The cogs tend to run pretty smoothly. It certainly didn’t feel like that for much of today.”

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This win takes Gloucester to the top of Pool Two, although they will lose that privilege when one or both of Munster and Castres collect the points from the pool’s other match, at Thomond Park on Sunday. Gloucester do, however, look a team on the move. This felt like the kind of victory alien to them not so long ago – calm and, when the occasion demanded, precise and intense. But this was not the Exeter team that dispatched them with ease here only a fortnight earlier.

There may be something about being winless and bottom of your pool that plays with the mind, just as much as the competition itself. There may be something about suffering your first domestic defeat of the season the week before. Exeter started quite well, but they soon became loose, particularly at the lineout. Gloucester were hardly precision personified themselves, but they did not have to work too hard to stay in the game and a flash of Ollie Thorley brilliance is never far away. And that proved enough to earn the visitors a half-time lead.

Santiago Cordero has become Exeter’s reliable source of inspiration – and his duel with Thorley opposite was a delight indeed. The Argentina wing danced his way past a clutch of defenders for the second time in the first seven minutes, coaxing a penalty advantage from one of the hapless grasping arms of men many inches taller, and the ball was transferred swiftly left, where Don Armand dummied and crashed over to put Exeter into an early lead.

Both sides’ kicking was wayward on a gusty, rainy lunchtime, but Matt Kvesic rued a loose kick more than most when Thorley gathered and did some dancing of his own. Cordero was the third or fourth man he beat, but when Alex Cuthbert somehow cut Thorley off Willi Heinz was on hand to finish a brilliant try. A Danny Cipriani penalty on the stroke of half-time had Gloucester 10-5 up at the break.

Nic White’s solo try put Exeter back in the lead within a minute or two of the resumption, but another Kvesic error, in at the side this time, allowed Cipriani to restore the visitors’ advantage with a penalty five minutes’ later.

Gloucester are far from the consistent force they long to be, far from Exeter, for example, but their capitulation away from home can no longer be taken for granted. They looked comfortable still and in the final quarter, when the most consistent so often rouse themselves, they moved up a gear.

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Henry Trinder won an up-and-under and moments later it was Cipriani’s turn to flash his weekly contribution to the genius catalogue, delaying his pass beautifully to Jaco Visagie, which sent the hooker to the line. Eight points up with 15 to go, they might have prepared to batten down the hatches for the inevitable Exeter assault.

It never came. Instead, it was Gloucester who mounted the next assault. And then the next try. They might as well have been Exeter when they opted to send a penalty to the corner with 10 to go, cranking up the maul to work Ben Morgan over in the corner.

Exeter did manage a reprise of their routine, driving Tom Lawday over with a minute to go,but it was academic. They know all too keenly that success in Europe requires another dimension they have yet to attain.